Content as Infrastructure: An Infrastructure You Can Scale With

Gartner forecasts that by 2020, the number of IoT devices will surpass 20 billion units — more than double the earth’s human population. But does your brand have the infrastructure to keep up?

We’re continuing with our explanation of our Content as Infrastructure approach to the API era — an era that requires enterprises to have more control over their content and customer experiences than ever before.

Today, we’re focusing on the third and final pillar of our Content as Infrastructure philosophy; which is our underlying technological infrastructure.

Because most of the organization’s staff are non-technical, they needed a CMS that was easy to manage even with limited resources. They also wanted to lean on a vendor — as well as a community — for support when necessary. And that’s exactly the solution they found in dotCMS.

Using dotCMS’s copy host feature, America’s leading healthcare provider was able to easily build out sites for all the hospitals and surgical centers in their network without having to re-code the backend or rely on individual servers for each instance. The result was that their 1,000+ sites could share data, and be housed within one core platform — and yet, website design, login credentials, and local data could be customized for each individual facility. Now that’s true multi-tenant architecture at play!

In addition to the multisite and multi-tenant architecture provided by dotCMS, Hospital Corporation of America also benefited from our API architecture, scalability, granular permissions, customizable workflows, and a ‘NoCode’ backend that’s built for marketers and business people. This, along with the support of the dotCMS team and community, meant that the healthcare services provider’s team can easily build out their site without relying heavily on an internal development team.

Like we said, Content as Infrastructure isn’t just a play on words, it truly is the philosophy that underpins each dimension of every dotCMS project.

Besides being able to integrate with leading suite applications, dotCMS also has a vast array of tools to ingest and display content from external sources. The tools provided can allow you to pull data from a variety of formats including Cookies, RSS Feeds, Text and HTML, Files and Web APIs. Making it easier for you to repurpose content across channels — instead of duplicating work for each individual touchpoint.

dotCMS is also ideal for usage in voice projects, as Gettysburg College recently discovered for themselves. The college leveraged dotCMS’ hybrid platform to build an array of Alexa Skills for their campus. This involved integrating with the Amazon Voice Service, managing diverse conversation and response types, allowing the college to add and update responses, as well as managing “Cards” for corresponding iOS and Android apps.

Moreover, Gettysburg College are currently experimenting with AI technologies — which dotCMS also integrates with — to help shift their content from being a one-way presentation to an interactive conversation between the college, its students and its staff.

Cloud Environments Built for the API Era

By leveraging industry leading cloud and CDN technology, dotCMS customers are able to build both containers, microservices and monoliths in the manner required to deliver fast, reliable and memorable digital experiences. In fact, an increasing number of our clients across a range of industries use dotCMS to deploy containers.

In fact, as part of the dotCMs 5.0 release, a huge improvement to the usability of containers within the platform. Containers can be used multiple times on the same page, leading to the decrease in the number of templates and the overall ease of management of templates, layouts and containers.

dotCMS currently has the following cloud technology partners that help our customers thrive in the cloud:

Amazon Web Services

Amazon API Gateway

Docker

Azul Systems

Kubernetes

Akamai

Fastly

Moreover, dotCMS is being used by brands to build, deliver and manage Single Page Applications (SPAs) and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), which are two emerging touchpoints that our enterprise customers are exploring more aggressively.

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dotCMS has an open integration philosophy. We believe integration should be lightweight at all
levels, making digital experience integrations fast and efficient. This also means less risk to core
business applications as well as creating a solution architecture that remains flexible enough to cater
to continuous change with an overall lower total cost of ownership.

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